Signs It’s Time for Financial Management Software

Like most businesses today, you want to improve the productivity and accuracy of your financial activities and to make regulatory compliance easier. But, how do you know if you’re ready for a financial management software package?

In every organization, there comes a time when manual financial processes are simply no longer effective. Increasingly complex transactions, the need to coordinate financial activities across multiple teams and departments, and legislation and guidelines that get more and more rigid each year are making it nearly impossible for finance departments to operate successfully without a financial management software solution.

What are the signs its time for your business to implement financial management software?

Lack of Information Accessibility

Can your business units track the status of their open purchase orders? Can your department managers view up-to-date budget information? Can your sales managers easily compare their forecasts to actual recognized revenues?

Without a financial management software system, companies will have difficulty sharing critical financial data across numerous divisions and locations. So, financial staff members are often called upon to run reports. This not only hinders the efficiency of the financial department, it also delays the delivery of the vital information that professionals in other departments need to perform their jobs. Financial management software solves this problem by centralizing all financial-related data, so any authorized user can easily retrieve it, whenever it’s needed.

Poor Data Quality

Manual data entry, transaction processing, and related activities are cumbersome and time-consuming. But, that’s not the biggest issue. They can also seriously affect the integrity of financial data, causing errors and inconsistencies that can lead to poor decision-making, ineffective strategic planning, and worst of all, lack of compliance with financial reporting regulations.

Financial management software eliminates these manual processes and replaces them with streamlined, fully-automated ones. As a result, companies can rest assured that their financial data is 100 percent accurate and up-to-date at all times.

Inability to Forecast and Plan

Organizations that don’t use a financial management software system lack the capacity to leverage their historical financial data to identify crucial trends and patterns in the business. This makes it extremely difficult to predict future events and to determine how they will impact the company’s financial status, operations, and performance.

Lack of Global Visibility

Can you readily obtain a complete, 360-degree view of all your financial operations across all offices, business units, and divisions – even those that reside overseas?

As companies expand into international territories, they are usually challenged to effectively manage global financial activities remotely from their home base. Financial management software provides a broad range of features that address the need to track and monitor worldwide financial operations. This, in turn, eliminates the lack of coordination, inefficiency, poor collaboration, and risk of regulatory non-compliance associated with an inability to achieve unhindered global financial visibility.